Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson - Poetry Summary & Analysis

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Poetry Summary and Analysis

The first poem in this collection, Goodbye, is a bittersweet faretheewell to the world from a poet who expresses considerable heartbreak. The poet says he will not miss the crowds, or the struggles for wealth, or the leaden hearts of his fellow man but looks forward to being "safe in my sylvan" home, one with nature and with God. The Problem reflects Emerson's split with the church and his deepening involvement with transcendentalism. It employs echoes of classicism evidently inspired by the English Romantic poets Keats and Shelley and uses a number of false rhymes in its A-A B-B C-C rhyming patters: "shrine/within," "sphere/air," "fell/oracle." Uriel attempts to invoke the mystical, haunted realms of the spirit so brilliantly expressed by Edgar Allan Poe—a contemporary of Emerson's. "This was the lapse of Uriel/Which in Paradise befell...